… for actually answering the stupid how do you feel question.
The flat monotone, one hand protectively held against his face.
The sheer oddness of seriously depressive content coming from a tall handsome champion athlete… The oddness of soulfulness offered to a highly lit studio of jock-journalists…
In the midst of life we are in death. In the midst of superficiality we are in depth.
One source has him also saying that he wants “to solve myself,” which made UD think of her guru, Adam Phillips, who warns it ain’t gonna happen. Also Philip Larkin:
‘And once you have walked the length of your mind, what
You command is clear as a lading-list.
Anything else must not, for you, be thought
To exist.
And what’s the profit? Only that, in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.’
But other good things can happen – settling into who you unchangeably are, and the suffering that life inescapably generates, in a such a way that your “appetitive” energy remains reasonably high (in this case, that a win on the court actually makes you happy and motivates you to win future matches). Since you’re never going to solve yourself, the better path is away from Who Am I and toward simply the daily appetitive enjoyment of your existence — an enjoyment that should indeed involve the enjoyment (or at least you find it interesting; or at least you find it tolerable!) of incessant conflict and uncertainty.
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And as happens so often in life, the Zverev scene was taken directly from Waiting for Godot:
the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the skull alas the stones